csammisrun

http://www.flickr.com/photos/csammis/

Ba-dum-bum!

The moon was very bright last night and, having received instructions on how to take a picture of the moon last time it was full, decided to try my hand:

These were taken about 9:45 PM. The recommended camera settings are 1/250″ shutter speed and F11 aperture, these were taken at 1/250″, F8 (because that’s as high as my camera will go) and 12x zoom. I did these without an actual tripod, just crouching down and balancing the camera on the rail of my porch. Next time I’ll try it with a tripod as that got uncomfortable very fast.

Just for comparison’s sake, here’s a picture with the camera at the same position, same settings, except with a 1x zoom. Where da moon at??

I can see a lot of stars where I live. This is completely novel to me having lived in Chicago, Ames, and Des Moines over the past 24 years. Last night I decided to see if the stars were, in fact, bright enough for my camera to pick up. The results were encouraging, if not a little noisy:

I spent about fifteen minutes outside (it was cold!) fiddling with the manual settings on my camera. I was using a tripod and a 30″ shutter speed, but I wasn’t having much luck until I turned up the ISO to 400 and messed with the apeture…I forget in which direction. That got me some stars, but also a lot of noise in the image. I’m going to spend the next few nights fiddling with settings until I get something clear. If I can keep the long shutter speeds with less noise, some fairly sweet pictures might result. Even in this picture, you can see movement trails. I thought at first it was jitter on the tripod, but when I thought about it, the trails line up with the movement of the Earth. Now that is cool

We interrupt this regularly scheduled week of the same wallpaper to post a picture that I took of a spider on its web that was on my porch. Now, ordinarily I hate spiders with a passion that outburns the fiery hearts of a thousand suns, but this guy was just hanging out and I realized that I could use him to figure out how to manually set the focal length on my camera. It turns out that my camera’s manual focus settings might be a little stupid — I can guaruntee that I was not 90cm away from the spider when I took this shot, although that’s how it focused…maybe it meant 90mm — but I think it came out alright for a first attempt.

Click for high-res (and I mean high-res). You can see parts of the spider that would make an entymologist blush.